The benefits of the Chelsea chop!
We could all learn a lot from nature as Fr Jason Murphy articulates beautifully in his latest column Let the Busy World Be Hushed...
They were standing in line at the check-in desk waiting, each in turn, to place their bags on the conveyor belt and to collect their boarding passes as their tour guide kept an eye at the top of the queue as each of the ladies in the group showed their passport to the Aer Lingus agent.
This lady who seemed to be in charge had a word for each of the women as they approached, ‘did you enjoy yourself Mary?'... 'Didn’t the few days just fly by, Margaret?’ each one wearing a name badge with the travel company’s emblem emblazoned above to make it easy for the guide to identify them by name. I was sure they were on the last leg of a pilgrimage from a Marian shrine, this group of 40 or so women with a couple of weary husbands thrown in for good measure and, when it came for me to check in my bag with some still in the queue behind me, I ventured to ask the lady who seemed to be their guide: ‘Are you on your way home from a pilgrimage.’
‘Yes indeed you could call it a pilgrimage,’ she replied. ‘Was it Fatima or Lourdes you were in? I asked in return. ‘Not this time’ said the woman. ‘We were over at the Chelsea Flower Show with a little sightseeing thrown in, a pilgrimage to the Mecca of Horticulture and the same ones come time and time again.’ My ears pricked when I heard mention of the Chelsea Flower Show for it's something I always intended to visit, so I asked: ‘Is it as good as they make it out to be on the television?’
‘Well, do you know, this year was a disaster for it was all about weeds and embracing all that grows wild in the garden and we didn’t go to Chelsea to learn about growing weeds,’ she retorted.
We stood as I checked in my bag and talked about all things gardening as I told her of my own pilgrimage to the renown gardens of Great Dixter and Sissinghurst and she told of how she wrote for the Irish Garden magazine.
We had a great chat as I stood back to let her usher on the remainder of her horticultural pilgrims until the last was checked in and it was time to part ways as she accompanied these garden aficionados up the escalators.
Indeed all the talk reminded me on my return home to make sure I did the ‘Chelsea chop’, before it got too late, something that is done every year in and around the time of the Chelsea Flower Show, cutting back by a third herbaceous flowering plants, phloxes and geraniums, achillea and echinacea to mention but a few, preventing them from getting too tall and gangly and delaying their flowering to later in the season when all else had shed their bloom.
For, if you’re into gardening as with all things of nature, it teaches you so much about life and living, lessons about waiting over time for something to grow and develop, planting now for something that will not bear fruit for perhaps a year or years to come, knowing that patience in itself brings its own rewards. Learning too about soil types, that certain plants flourish in certain soils, some like full sun, others full or partial shade, all of these lessons can apply to living each day as with the Chelsea chop.
As with plants, we need to take care that we do not allow ourselves to grow with wild abandon especially in the heat of the summer sun, when it seems that the rains will never come again and we are drawn by the light that never wanes. It is when the going is good and we are on the crest of a wave that is most difficult to curtail our growth, to do a little of the Chelsea chop, to hold back our flowering until a time later in the season when all other blossoms have faded, everything within urges onwards, towards flowering early, but our stems are not fully developed to carry the heavy blossom and, come a burst of heavy rain, our tall stems are broken and our blossoms strewn over the ground.
For those who knew better, our predecessors, who recognised these things inherently, who we thought were merely curtailing our flowering by drawing boundaries that we did not cross, were in fact the greatest of gardeners, who needed not a pilgrimage to a flower show to teach them the benefits of pruning and blossoming for they had learned over time unbeknownst to them the benefits of the Chelsea Chop.
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